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Film Fests & Special Screenings Movies & TV

>>> Cinefranco makes a comeback

CINEFRANCO: FRANCOPHONE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL October 27 to November at the Spadina Theatre, Alliance Francaise de Toronto (24 Spadina Road). Rating: NNNN


Every spring for the past 19 years, the Cinéfranco film festival rolled through Toronto with a sampling of French-language cinema from around the world. 

But not this year.

Citing “financial constraints”, organizers postponed the 2016 edition, though two smaller sidebar festivals – the Cinéfranco Youth Program and a weekend of Quebec cinema – went on in February and April, respectively.

This was bad news. Sure, it was one less festival for the clogged spring season, but Toronto film buffs have come to love Cinéfranco for its broad-spectrum program of commercial cinema that would otherwise never see the inside of a theatre in English Canada. 

Well, make with the bonnes nouvelles everyone: Cinéfranco 2016 is back on, running a slightly smaller program at the Alliance Française De Toronto on Spadina Road. 

What used to run for a week and a half is now compressed to six days, with screenings tonight (October 27) through November 1. But the program is still as varied as ever – a mixture of comedies, dramas and thrillers, most of them playing in Toronto for the first time.

The opening night bill alone offers two entirely different movies. Back To Mom’s (October 27, 6:30 pm) is a standard generational comedy about an architect (Alexandra Lamy) who has to move back in with her widowed mother (Josiane Balasko), while Montreal, White City (October 27, 8 pm) is a muted two-hander – adapted from director’s Bashir Bensaddek’s own stage play – starring Karina Aktouf and Raba Aït Ouyahla as a pair of Algerian ex-pats whose lives intersect on a wintry Christmas Eve.

Made In France (October 28, 8 pm) is a gritty thriller about a French journalist (Malik Zidi) who falls in with four young men aiming to start an Islamic terror cell. It plays like an unnervingly straight version of Chris Morris’s brilliant satire Four Lions, and that’s a compliment.

I’m a little curious as to the thinking that finds The Scent Of Mandarin screening October 29 at 11 am. Gilles Legrand’s period piece about the tortured marriage of a wounded veteran (Olivier Gourmet) and his emotionally damaged nurse (Georgia Scalliet) is decidedly adult drama with deeply affecting performances from both leads. 

Of everything I’ve seen in Cinéfranco’s lineup, it’s the film I could see getting a theatrical run somewhere in town, if the right distributor gets behind it. Although there might also be a market for the oddball comedy Saint Amour (October 30 1 pm), which casts French legend Gérard Depardieu and Belgian chameleon Benoit Poelvoorde (Man Bites Dog, Coco Avant Chanel) as a father and son and sends them on a wine tour of France by taxi. 

I have no idea, given Depardieu’s stature, why it didn’t play TIFF, but maybe it’s better this way – a film as weird as this would have fallen through the cracks of a larger festival. This way, it definitely stands out, and gives people another reason to check out Cinéfranco. 

Here’s hoping the festival is back to full strength in 2017. I’ll be waiting.

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